Mack Reynolds - Once Departed

Quint chuckled. “That’s quite an if .”

Bart Digby dropped his bomb. “The evidence is that Martin Bormann, and probably Doktor Stahlecker, are somewhere here in Spain.”

Quint stared at him.

The other said emptily, “If so, we’ve got to get to him first. We’ve got to get him and either retry him, or, better still, execute the sentence he was given in absentia . It’s the only way to prove we hate the Nazi dream just as much as anyone else.”

After Bart Digby had left, Quint sat for awhile over Fundador and a cup of black coffee. The other had painted an interesting picture, and the American columnist wondered just how much of it was to be completely believed. He couldn’t quite swallow Digby’s contention that he had resigned from the C.I.A. On the face of it, the man was vitally interested in this possibility of Martin Bormann being in hiding in Spain. And a man without a job doesn’t usually involve himself in such poorly remunerative matters.

Of course, there was also the possibility that Bart Digby had resigned—or been fired, as Mike Woolman had it—from the C.I.A. and was not peddling his services elsewhere. Nobody as yet had mentioned why the Central Intelligence Agency and Bartholomew Digby had parted ways. Was it because his superiors had caught him delving into matters of which they didn’t approve?

If the story he had told about Martin Bormann was correct, there was still another angle. It wasn’t exactly a new idea. In fact, it was sometimes told about Hitler himself. That Hitler had lived, that he had been smuggled out of collapsing Berlin, and by submarine been taken to the Argentine, or some such, where he remained in hiding waiting his chance to regain power. The trouble with that particular bit of fantasy was that immediately before his suicide, Hitler, a badly wounded, mentally shaken man who dragged one foot as he walked, had celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday. Persons who had been present described him as senile, his head and hands shaking continually. Had he escaped, even in this condition, how old would he be in 1968? Seventy-nine years of age. Not exactly the time of life to start regaining an empire. The same applied to Bormann who had probably been somewhere in his forties at the time of his disappearance. He wouldn’t be exactly a young man twenty-five years after.

Quint grimaced and finished his double shot of cognac. He considered another. No, foul it! If he was ever going to get any work done, he’d have to get back to the apartment. He hated to work in the afternoon, particularly after he’d had a few drinks, but he had to get cracking.

He paid his bill, and started back to the car. Traffic was lighter, but already beginning to resume volume. He darted a look at his watch. He’d been in the German restaurant talking to Bart Digby for longer than he had thought. He’d have to get a move on, or the whole day would be shot.

It wasn’t in the cards. When he got back to the parked Renault, it was to find Mike Woolman leaning against it, obviously waiting for him.

Quint said, “Gangway, Buster. I haven’t any time for the likes of you. This downtrodden proletarian has to get back to the sweatshop and get exploited by the bloodsucking capitalists.”

“Put a good title on that,” Mike said, “and think up a snappy ending, and you could sell it. What’d you find out?”

Quint looked at him warily. “What’d I find out about what?”

Mike sighed. He pulled the morning edition of the Madrid Pueblo from his jacket pocket and slapped it smartly against his knee. “Look,” he said, “come on up to Chicote’s, and I’ll buy you a drink.”

“Never touch the stuff,” Quint told him. “I’ve got to get back and do some work.”

“I’ll tell you what I know, if you tell me what you know,” Mike said.

Quint looked at him sourly. “If my poor sainted mother knew I hung around with bad influences like you… okay, let’s go.”

Chicote’s, one of the half dozen most famed bars in the world, is located at No. 12, Jose Antonio, about a hundred yards up the street from where Quint had parked. They made their way in that direction.

Something there is about a score or so saloons throughout the world that gives them a soul, the very soul of the city in which they dispense the beverage that sooths. Sloppy Joe’s in Havana, Pat O’Brien’s in New Orleans, Harry’s in Venice, the Raffles Bar in Singapore, the Crystal in Tombstone, McSorley’s in New York. Each of these are the cities in which they exist. Pat O’Brien’s is New Orleans; Harry’s New York Bar, in Paris, is the Paris of the expatriate American. Just as Dean’s in Tangier, was Tangier, and the city and Dean’s died together, it was never the same after the old bartender passed away.

So it is that Chicote’s is Madrid’s bar. Internationally famed, wherever the drinking set bend elbows. And what made it so? The endless publicity given gratis by such as Papa Hemingway in his stories? The personality of the original Chicote himself? The fact that the place is the hangout of the most beautiful whores in Spain? The fabulous liquor museum in the basement—the largest collection of alcoholic drinks in the world? Perhaps all of these things.

Be that as it may, when Quint Jones and Mike Woolman pushed their way through the door, emerging from the white glare of the afternoon sun of Spain into the dim cool of the large bar, it wasn’t in search of any of the establishment’s claims to fame other than its liquor. Spanish laws are lax, if not non-existent, when it comes to beverages, but there is no record of a customer ever complaining of cut whisky, or a phonied up vintage date on his wine bottle in Chicote’s.

Mike darted a nervous glance around the Spanish equivalent of a cocktail lounge, which made up the first large room as you entered from the street. The long bar was beyond. Aside from half a dozen lackadaisical tarts, sitting alone at their tables, empty coffee cups before them and awaiting a trade that seldom developed this time of day, the lounge was empty.

Mike banged himself with his paper and said, “Let’s get in a corner here. Some of the bartenders speak English.”

They found a table, Quint ordered Fundador and Mike, Veterano cognac.

Quint grunted at the other’s choice of brandy. “That stuff’s too sweet,” he said, as the waiter poured the double shot.

“Thank God you don’t have to drink it,” Mike said.

When the waiter was gone, Quint sipped his drink and said, “Okay. You tell yours first.”

The newsman said, “Nothing startling but it backs some of the possibilities I brought up this morning. You know Albrecht Stroehlein, the plump, weepy eyed ex-Gestapo lad who claims he used to be buddy-buddy with Hitler back in the old beerhall days.”

“ So?”

“So, I’ve been checking on him. Up until a couple of months ago he was on his uppers. Worked for a while as a waiter on the Costa del Sol, begged handouts from more prosperous Nazi refugees, that sort of thing. But then he went up to Berlin.”

“Berlin!” Quint said. “I thought he was wanted for war crimes.”

“Evidently, somebody’s had a change of mind. When he returned, he got himself nicely outfitted, rented a swank apartment, started eating in Horcher’s. That sort of thing.”

Quint said, “West Berlin, or East Berlin?”

Mike thought about that, rubbing the bottom of his chin nervously. “I wouldn’t know. Maybe I can find out. Actually, Berlin is the big clearing house for European espionage these days.”

Quint said, “Listen, is it possible that Stroehlein knew personally such bigwigs as Martin Bormann, Heinrich Mueller, Doktor Stahlecker? Knew them well enough so that if he saw one of them today, he’d recognize him?”